invisible audience

It is hard to have fun in graduate school or in workshops, but if you were sitting on a dock in Arkansas and watching bass boats speed by and the sun was setting in the west (since it does not usually set anywhere else) and you had a decent knowledge of iambic pentameter–or a few hundred poems memorized–you could have fun. I once spent a whole day speaking in blank verse. It was fun for me. It was not fun for those poor souls around me, but what the hell? On another occasion, I had a conversation with someone else who spoke in blank verse and we drove others crazy. We were in the liquor store:

This rum is coconut, not to my taste
but being broke and vulgar you might try?

Fie thee, mere peasant in the guise of Lord
let’s make the most of what we can afford!

Aye… for a pittance, Mr. Boston here
proffers a fifth of vodka. With some juice
it may not prove too dangerous to drink.
It’s cheaper than the rum. What do you think?

We were more annoying and clever than the fucking exchanges on the Gilmore Girls. Verse and meter made us so. I have often fantasized about a nation that could stop being simple, to the point, and frank, and start beating all around the bush. The more I spoke in iambic pentameter, the more I wanted to walk over to the side of wherever I was and have a few words with the invisible audience. I realized that form makes us insane, not its absence. The neutral, flat free verse of the middle class, in so far as it was given to phatic exchanges that are ritualized and automatic is a form of insanity. The norm is the agreed-upon madness. The abnormal is speech without consensus. Suppose two people had an exchange that went like this:

The leafy eglantine goes down to death. I am, by penguins, love, sorely assuaged.

And I the bitter root must gnaw, my dear. Wax umber. We are all disquieted!

I sure would love to live in a world that spoke like this, or would I? It might be fun to spend a day inserting words we don’t usually employ into our otherwise drab and information based existence. If someone says “How are you?” You might answer

I plumb what depths there be, ere there be depths
yet hug the shore, for fear of an ill wind.
Thus shallow am I as your feigned concern,
How goes it friend? How sails thee, stem to stern?

Or suppose you answered in what sounded like spy code:

The good duck eats the stale white bread at dawn. The moon laughs at the well hung jury.

Most poetry, before the 20th century was meant to be relational. As such it assumed a listener or reader with a common sensibility and sense of meter. Modernism and post-modernism decided to disconnect from this relational dynamic. The poems are routines made out of words, and you may like the striptease or not–understand it as a thing, a construct, etc, etc. Relational poetry still exists, even that kind which assumes a certain type of reader, but not in Brooklyn (which, as I have been told, runs the world). I don’t know if I want to be a contemporary poet anymore. Maybe I never was. I don’t want to be a formalist as it is defined by Marylin Hacker or any number of folks, though I am often delighted by some of their poems and wish them well. I want to have fun. I think that’s why I have been so depressed lately…Where’s the fun? I must be a madman. I am not speaking the same language as contemporary poetry.